by Taylor Smith
She felt his uncertain grasp on her arm and turned to find his great, brown eyes riveted on her, questioning, imploring. She tried to resist their mute appeal and turn away, but he gripped her tighter, his eyes never leaving her face. She slumped into a chair beside him and exhaled deeply. She couldn’t hate him, however much she wanted to.
“I wish you could tell me how it happened,” she whispered. “I need to know why.”
His eyebrows knit together for a brief moment, puzzled, and then his expression became vacant and his gaze drifted away. Mariah sighed, then reached out with her free hand and touched his cheek. “Oh, David,” she said sadly.
He turned his eyes back to her and she felt him pulling her hand into his lap.
“No!” she cried, leaping up. “Damn you, David. How could you?” She walked across the room, then wheeled around to face him. “Where’s your Elsa now?” she hissed. “Let her give you what you need, like she did in Vienna!”
She regretted the angry words the moment they escaped her lips. David’s eyes went wide, and a deep, guttural moan escaped his throat. Mariah clapped her hand to her mouth and stood rooted to the spot, unsure which gave her more pain—the confirmation of the ugly truth that she saw in his eyes, or the agony it was obviously causing him. She moved beside the wheelchair and put her arms around him.
“David, don’t—please. It doesn’t matter now.” She held him tightly, his head on her shoulder, her fingers laced through his dark curls. He was moaning and his stronger hand gripped her arm. They swayed together until Mariah heard the clip-slide of Lindsay’s uneven gait coming down the hall. “Here’s Lins,” she whispered, pulling back, wiping away her tears and David’s. “Come on, David—please. We have to be strong for her.”
He positioned his head against the headrest of the chair, watching her until Lindsay limped in. Then he shifted his gaze to his daughter.
“Toblerone!” Lindsay cried victoriously, waving the triangular box.
Mariah managed a wan smile while Lindsay got herself up onto the bed, opened the box and broke off a piece. She reached over to put it in David’s hand, but he seemed unable to muster the strength to lift his arm. The chocolate rolled out of his fingers and onto the floor.
“Dad! Wasting chocolate—that’s a hanging offense,” Lindsay said mock-indignantly, echoing the words he had always used with Mariah whenever she tried to confiscate their stash.
“I think Daddy’s tired, honey. He sounds like he’s coming down with a cold. We should go and let him rest now.”
“Okay,” Lindsay said. She took one bite of the bar and then refolded it carefully in the wrapper and box. Sliding off the bed, she slipped it into the pocket of his shirt. “You can have it later, okay, Dad?”
He smiled up at her and reached his hand to her face, his finger unsteadily tracing her cheek.
“I love you, too,” Lindsay said. She hugged him, then put on her jacket and headed for the doorway.
“Go on ahead, Lins. I’ll catch up with you in just a minute.”
When she left, Mariah turned back to David and took his face in her hands. “Listen to me, David. I love you, now and always, and I know you love me. I know that,” she repeated, forcing him to look into her eyes again when his gaze dropped. “Whatever went wrong in Vienna, no one can take that away. Nothing can change what we were together.”
His sad eyes held hers, and then he blinked slowly, once.
“I forgot to give you this,” Lindsay said, reaching into her school backpack.
They had stopped in front of Carol’s house in Alexandria and Mariah was lifting Lindsay’s party clothes out of the back seat of the Volvo while her daughter hauled out her schoolbooks.
“What is it?” she asked.
Lindsay pulled a manila envelope out of her bag. “I don’t know. Some man came up to me in the hall at school yesterday and said I should take this home to you.”
“Some man? What man?”
“I don’t know. A teacher, I guess—I don’t know all the staff yet. Anyway, he said to give this to you.”
“Okay, drop it on the front seat. I’ll look at it later.”
Carol’s husband, Michael, opened the front door and took Lindsay’s heavy book bag from her, then waved them in. The house was bathed in the scent of evergreen from the Scotch pine Christmas tree twinkling in the living room and the spruce garlands draped over the mantel and winding up the stair rail, all festooned with red-and-green tartan ribbons.
“Come on in,” he said, leading them into the living room. “Carol’s just putting the baby to bed for his nap. She’ll be right down.”
A voice rang out, “And here she is!” Carol sailed in and hugged Lindsay warmly, then Mariah. As much as her twin, Stephen, resembled their father, Carol was the spitting image of their mother: slim, tall, light brown hair and eyes. She also had her mother’s cheerful, outgoing personality—a habitual brightness that not even her long illness had taken from Joanne Tucker. It wasn’t difficult to understand why losing her had been such a devastating blow to them all.
Frank’s wife had been in her mid-thirties when Mariah had first come to know his family, and Mariah had liked her instinctively. Watching Carol take Lindsay’s jacket, chatting away a mile a minute, she remembered how warmly Joanne had welcomed her the first time Frank had invited her home for dinner. She could have been resentful of a younger woman working closely with her husband—Mariah had seen it happen—but not Joanne Tucker. Mariah had arrived in town knowing not a soul, still hurting from the breakup with David. Joanne had seemed to recognize Mariah’s loneliness instantly and had taken her under her wing like a mother hen. Mariah had quickly become like an extended family member to the Tuckers.
“So you and Michael are heading over to your dad’s?” Mariah asked Carol.
She nodded. “He just called. We’re supposed to pick up a Christmas tree on the way. Pat’s over there and they were going to get it last night, but somehow they never got around to it.”
Michael grinned. “Nudge, nudge, wink, wink,” he said.
“Oh, shush!” Carol said with a laugh, slapping her husband’s arm. “Knowing my dad, he was probably up to his elbows in squid and forgot.”
“Squid?” Lindsay looked aghast. “Gross! What’s he doing with squid?”
“He’s got a new appetizer he’s trying out. It’s a Thai recipe, I think, called Fire and Ice.”
Mariah grinned. “Knowing Frank, it’ll be interesting, I’m sure.” Lindsay and Michael looked skeptical.
“He’s having fun,” Carol said. “Poor guy, when we were kids, Dad was always chief cook and bottle washer, trying to take the load off Mom. He’d come home from work and spend his evenings cleaning and cooking. Even back then he tried to make new things, but Stevie never wanted anything but hamburgers and hot dogs. Now Dad can be as creative as he wants.”
The mention of Stephen reminded Mariah that her next stop was his apartment to pick up the CHAUCER file. “Well, we’ll know soon enough what Frank’s created this time,” she said. “I’d better hustle. I’ve got mince pies in the freezer that I need to thaw for tonight. Lindsay brought her party clothes. You’re still okay to take her over with you?”
“Absolutely,” Carol said, putting her arm around Lindsay. “Michael and I will come back to get dressed and pick up her and Alex. I’m hoping you’re going to let me play with that hair,” she added to Lindsay, looking wistfully at the russet curls. “It’s not as much fun dressing up baby Alex. I need a little girl to fuss over.”
Michael rolled his eyes. “No fun? He hasn’t got much hair, maybe, but you know what she’s putting him in for this party?” he asked Lindsay. She shook her head. “An elf outfit!” Michael said, grimacing. “My son, the elf.”
Lindsay giggled and Mariah smiled.
Stephen Tucker’s apartment building—a drab cracker box with steel balconies and row on row of identical square windows—was one of those nondescript high rises that sprang up like mushrooms in the early sixties befor
e community activists began to object to the blight on the pretty, northern Virginia landscape.
Mariah stepped through the front door of the building and scanned the directory on the wall next to the intercom. She found his name and pressed the button for apartment 601. When the latch on the door clicked, she walked in and headed for the elevator, casting a wry glance at the droopy ficus tree that filled one corner of the lobby, its leaves yellowing at the tips, its pot sprinkled with cigarette butts. Stepping off the elevator at the sixth floor, she spotted Stephen standing in a doorway just to her left, his bulk blocking most of the opening.
“Hi,” she said, heading toward him. “You must be beat. I realized as I was driving over here that you can’t have had more than a few hours’ sleep the last couple of days. We can’t go on meeting like this.”
“It’s okay. Come on in.”
The inside of his apartment was as uninspired as the lobby promised. While the sunlight streaming through the windows made a valiant effort to brighten the place, in the end it only drew attention to the dust on the vinyl blinds and the fact that the off-white Berber carpet needed a good shampooing. There was a sagging brown sofa and armchair in the living room, a stained oak coffee table littered with magazines, a stereo against the wall and little else by way of furniture. The monotony of the white walls was relieved only by a few colorful posters advertising computer games—Sleuth and Super Sleuth, Castle Keep, Dinowarriors and, of course, Wizard’s Wand.
Mariah peered at the posters. “Are all of these your games?”
Stephen nodded. “There’s another one coming out in a couple of months—Wizard’s Weapon. It’s based on Wand, but more complex. They’re doing a really sharp poster for that one. The distributor says the advance orders for the game are rolling in like crazy.”
“This is incredible, Stevie,” Mariah said, suddenly seeing him in a whole new light. “You’re a one-man computer games empire. How is it that you haven’t been profiled in People magazine or Fortune or somewhere?”
“No way. I write them under a pseudonym and the distributor handles all the advertising and media hype.”
“One of these days, you’re going to have to quit hiding that light under a bushel, Stephen Tucker,” she scolded. “This is a real talent you have.”
“It’s only kid games,” he said, turning away with a shrug. “No big deal. I just made some coffee. You want some?”
She followed him into the kitchen. “No, thanks—you go ahead, though. It is too a big deal, Stephen. I’m not really into computer games, but I know from watching Lindsay and her friends that the competition is stiff. There are a lot of games out there. Yours must be great to be doing so well.”
“It’s just a stupid hobby,” he said dismissively, picking through a sinkful of dirty dishes until he found a cup. He rinsed it briefly under the tap and then filled it with coffee, dropped in three teaspoons of sugar from a canister on the counter and reached into the fridge for cream. As he added it to his cup, Mariah saw Cokes, catsup, the remainders of a pizza and little else in the refrigerator.
“I still think you’re too modest by half,” she said, turning away. There was an old card table and chairs in the kitchen that she remembered having seen at his parents’ house years ago. Then she noticed the oven and stopped cold. “Stevie, why do you have cereal boxes in your oven?”
He glanced at the wall-mounted oven, the Froot Loops and Frosted Flakes clearly visible through the glass door. “Easy to find. I eat breakfast at two or three in the morning when I get home from work, at which point I’m not too alert.”
Mariah stared at him blankly, then burst out laughing. “You’re a nut, you know that?”
“I’m sure my father agrees with you,” he said, frowning.
“It’s not a criticism, Stephen. The world needs all the eccentrics it can get. God knows, the so-called normal types haven’t done much of a job running things. You’re unique, my friend—don’t ever change.”
His color deepened and his dark eyes shifted away. “Come on. I’ll show you what I got for you.”
She followed him out of the kitchen, across the living room and into the bedroom. If the decor of the rest of the apartment was early garage sale, the bedroom, aside from the rumpled bed shoved against the wall, was a high-tech warehouse. A quick glance revealed two PCs—an IBM and a Macintosh—a laser printer, a modem, a fax machine, a strange-looking keyboard with dozens of buttons and slides, and several other pieces of equipment that Mariah couldn’t begin to identify, with cables running everywhere linking it all together.
“Holy smoke!” she said. “This is an incredible setup. What’s this thing?” She ran her fingers along the complicated keyboard.
“Digital sampler,” Stephen explained. “I use it to create some of the audio effects and voices for the games.”
Mariah shook her head in amazement. Her gaze continued its circuit around the room until it came to rest on two photographs taped over his bed. One was a picture of Joanne, Stephen’s mother. The other, Mariah realized as she moved closer to examine it, was a shot that she herself had taken one day when a much younger Stephen and David were playing chess in her dining room. Stevie was grinning mischievously as David pondered his next move, an amused but bedeviled frown creasing his forehead.
“I forgot about this picture,” she said quietly. “Those were good times.” Stephen came over and smoothed the tape holding up the picture. “You miss him, too, don’t you, Stevie?”
He nodded silently, then walked to the IBM and turned it on. As the screen began to glow, he opened a small safe in the corner and pulled out a box of floppy disks. “You said Lindsay plays these games, so I assume you’ve got a PC at home?” Mariah nodded. Stephen held up a diskette to show her. It had a commercial label on it for Dinowarriors. “This is a modified disk—not the off-the-shelf game,” he said.
He slipped it in the disk drive, and a moment later an animated prehistoric scene appeared, featuring cavemen riding on the backs of dinosaurs, doing something that resembled jousting. Battle music and loud grunts and roars filled the room.
“Of course, this game is scientifically inaccurate,” Stephen said over the noise, watching the battle on the monitor. “Dinosaurs were extinct sixty million years before humans appeared.”
Mariah watched his face, the dark eyes locked on the figures on the screen. It was his little world, a world he had created—a world he controlled. But it wasn’t what she had come to see. “Stevie, what are we doing?”
“Patience,” he chided. “Watch.” He reached for the computer mouse and moved the cursor on the screen to the menu at the top, bringing it to stop on the Quit Game command. “You click the button on the mouse and hold it down for a count of ten, release, then do it one more time. Got that? Otherwise the system just shuts down.”
Mariah nodded, then watched him click the mouse as he had told her to do. A moment later, the dinosaurs disappeared and the noise died away. In their place came the familiar format of a CIA operations file index, with the code name CHAUCER as well as the security classification clearly indicated in the upper right-hand corner.
Mariah gasped. “My God, Stevie! How did you do this?” His grin was subtle and a trifle smug. She folded her arms across her chest. “Look—I’m no expert, but I’m not exactly computer illiterate, either,” Mariah said. “I happen to know the Company doesn’t use floppy disk computers precisely because if it did, people would be walking out with files every day. How did you copy this stuff?”
“A little creative wiring between my terminal at work and my laptop computer,” he said, reaching out with his stockinged toe to tap a case on the floor.
“You can’t take a laptop into the building, especially not in your area, I’m sure.” She peered at him closely. “Can you?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“No, I guess not—oh hell, yes I do!”
“Well, let’s just say that the night security guards get bored and I lend them my
laptop and some games from time to time. They’re always glad to see me bring it in.”
She closed her eyes, feeling suddenly woozy. “Oh, Stevie, this was a big mistake. I’m sorry I asked you to do it.”
“Don’t worry, Mariah. No one will know. There’s no trace on the mainframe data banks. And if anyone tries to use this diskette, all they’ll find is a dumb kids’ game.”
She opened her eyes and studied his face. “How did you get access to the file without a password?”
“That you don’t need to know, but there are ways, if you know the software well enough.”
“Did you read the file?”
He hesitated. “Only enough to be sure it was the right one. I found your first cable to Dad and his reply. That Russian source of yours—did he defect in the end?”
He didn’t realize it was a woman, Mariah thought. He hadn’t read the whole file on Tatyana Baranova. Good. “No. The source was discovered and repatriated by the KGB.”
“Bummer.”
“No kidding.”
Poor Tanya, Mariah thought, driving home a short time later with Stephen’s diskette in her purse. Where are you now?
It had been another Saturday morning, over two years earlier in Vienna, when she had met Tatyana Baranova for the second time at the ice rink where David’s team was playing against a local amateur hockey team. It was about halfway through the game. Mariah and Lindsay were sitting in the sparsely occupied stands, cheering on David and Paul Chaney. The two of them were racing toward the goal, blades singing on the ice, the puck zigzagging up the rink between them.
Suddenly, Mariah had glanced over to see that Tanya had appeared next to her. The woman had managed a smile, but her nervousness was apparent. She jumped when a shout went up from the ice. Mariah looked back down on the rink to see that Chaney had scored a goal. He and David thumped each other on the back, then looked into the stands. Lindsay was jumping up and down, cheering wildly. Mariah waved and gave them a thumbs-up, then turned to Tanya.
“You made it,” she said with a smile. “I’m glad. Come—sit down, Tanya.” She put her hand on the woman’s arm and guided her into the seat. Even through her heavy coat sleeve, Mariah could feel that Tanya was shaking.